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Diamonds So Hot They Produce Electricity!

Diamonds are getting hot enough to generate electricity! Bristol lab physicist Neil Fox spends his day manipulating delicate films of diamonds as thin as a human hair. Fox aims to turn these diamond films into a new kind of solar cell, one that generates electricity by absorbing heat rather than visible-light wavelengths. He is exploiting “thermionic emission”, the propensity of some materials to spit out electrons when heated, and it turns out that ultra thin diamond is better at this than most, reports New Scientist.